Total War: WARHAMMER [Steam, Feral Store] is the latest big Linux port from Feral Interactive. As someone who has only recently become a fan of Warhammer, it was fun to see this game arrive on Linux.

Note: My copy was provided by Feral Interactive.

The multiplayer is sadly only Linux to Linux. It is not cross-platform with Windows. This is a bit of a sore spot, but thankfully the single-player seems to be great. Feral confirmed to me that they are aiming to get Linux vs Mac like Empire and Med II in time for the Mac launch. You can see the reasoning why in Ellie's previous post about CoH2 here on Steam, which gives some small insight.

Considering that an Nvidia 970 can get practically 60FPS on Ultra settings, I would say the port is pretty well optimised.

The Linux scores are between 73% and 82% of Windows FPS, so pretty standard stuff when it comes to performance loss on OpenGL Linux ports.

I haven’t witnessed any large drops in performance during the campaign map or during larger battles, it’s been a real pleasure to play in terms of performance.

General thoughts
The game seems to be extremely stable, in my many hours of testing I haven’t encountered a single crash. It’s pleasing to see that Feral have kept putting out games that, at least for me, are very stable.

Like with XCOM 2, the Feral Launcher has a built-in Mod Manager, which uses the Steam Workshop. It’s also themed for the game once again:

As expected from a Warhammer title, the intro video is very well done and is graphically quite impressive. Would have been nice to have the intro at 60FPS, as the video is locked to 30FPS which does make it seem a bit sluggish. Still, it certainly got me interested in it right away so it did the job.

For those that don’t know, Total War: WARHAMMER is a mix of both a turn-based strategy and real-time strategy. The strategic board of the world is turn-based where you manage your empire, while the battles are intense real-time ordeals.

While there is a simple in-game tutorial when you play as The Empire, you can also access an overview which brings up a Youtube instruction video. I recommend watching it if you’re not familiar with Total War at all or, if like me, it’s been a long time since you last played one. It was very useful just to get a quick idea of what to expect.

Armies are each commanded by a Lord—who can level up, equip special items and banners, and gain skills. Each army can also have powerful hero units, which are interesting, as they can serve two functions: wander alone on the campaign map providing benefits to provinces they are in, or as a powerful unit within an army. Heroes also gain experience points from fighting and performing other actions, which can be used to upgrade them as well. These special units can be very useful in actual battles and they can sway the battle with their power.

It’s all rather familiar to anyone who has played any Total War, Civilization or other grand strategy type games. You will be dealing with research and diplomacy, rebellions and so on..The variety in gameplay comes from all the differences between the in-game factions. For example, Dwarfs will need to keep an eye on their grudges and act accordingly. Whereas the Vampire Counts spread corruption and things like that. It makes each faction a unique experience to play as, which is spices things up across multiple playthroughs.

What I really like about the game that helps me be genuinely interested in it is that it’s not bound by history. We have plenty of historical games, so it feels rather fresh. The variation in the different types of units is fantastic; seeing soldiers run at big lumbering monstrosities while massive artillery fire comes bearing down sure is a sight to see. The battles themselves are certainly brutally beautiful.

What I like about the battle system is that you don’t actually have to command the battles yourself. You can have them auto-resolve and the AI will just do it and present the outcome to you. This is particularly useful if you have an army that will quite obviously stomp all over an enemy easily. It saves you time when you might not want to even bother going directly into the battle yourself.

The battles are immensely fun, especially when you manage to hide entire legions of your troops inside a section of forest to flank your enemy. Using charging horses to break through enemy lines while archers and artillery strike, to thin them out, is glorious.

There is a bit of a controversy surrounding the DLC in the game. I won’t go on about it too long, but I feel the need to point it out. Warhammer as a universe is pretty violent, and this game is largely about destructive battles. To see any blood or gore you need to buy a cheap DLC and enable it. I admit it’s a complex issue due to ratings boards and if it was included by default, or as a free DLC the game would likely have a much higher rating. I don’t agree with it personally, but it is what it is. It’s a really minor feature that doesn’t actually add anything substantial to the gameplay, but I needed to mention it for clarity.

There’s also the fact that one extra playable race costs over a third of the price of the entire game, I’m certainly not a fan of the DLC model here.

Feral Interactive don't control the DLC or pricing though of course, so it's down to the original developer and publisher.

Still, even without the extra DLC on offer, there’s likely tens of hours you could put into it without needing any of it. The Total War games usually have a rather active modding community too, with Total War: WARHAMMER already having over 2,000 mods.

The problem I find is still the same as it is with all Total War games: I am horrific as a tactician when it comes to actually participating in battles. Not even my newly-found enthusiasm for Warhammer helped me learn to not lose all my soldiers repeatedly. Even though I’m really not very good at it, I found it to be the most interesting Total War game I’ve ever played. Likely because it doesn’t have a huge amount of depth to it (so it’s easy to get to grips with) and because it’s rather good-looking.

If you like Total War or Warhammer, this is probably a no-brainer purchase for you. If you’ve not played Total War before, this is probably a fantastic entry to get you into it as it’s quite easy to understand.

Are you sure? I can get 60 fps with ATTILA (which uses the same engine I think) only with low settings. A German game magazine had reported that even with a GTX 980 the framerate drops to 20 fps at some situations (under Windows!).

Well done Feral on another solid port. You guys are really doing amazing work. Please keep it up! Really hope you guys can keep this momentum going. Feral really starting to remind me of Loki back in the day just releasing port after port after port. Especially when DeusEx Mankind Divided came out, given Loki went under while porting the original DeusEx. Was quite a good feeling, kind of Feral continuing where Loki left off and now carrying the baton further. Well done guys! Can't wait to see what's next. Here's hoping you guys take another look at Bioshock, the remastered 1&2 for Linux would be pretty awesome

QuoteWhat I like about the battle system is that you don’t actually have to command the battles yourself. You can have them auto-resolve and the AI will just do it and present the outcome to you.

I've been burned by "auto-resolve" in so many games over the years that I refer to it as "auto-lose". In other games, I've had what should be have been a lopsided victory in my favor return a resounding defeat after clicking "auto-resolve". No thank you! It'd be great if it actually worked as expected in this game, but I have my doubts.

Performance looks great, so thumbs up to Feral, although I may wait for a deep discount just so I can get the "complete" game.

I would suggest Feral look into Enet. As far as networking libraries go especially for multi-platform support it's one of the best ones I know of. ENet provides a thin, simple and robust network communication layer on top of UDP. The primary feature it provides is optional reliable, in-order delivery of packets.

ENet also omits higher level networking features such as authentication, lobbying, server discovery, encryption, & other similar tasks that are particularly application specific so that the library remains flexible, portable, and easily embeddable.

"Any differences in the maths, even at the nth decimal place of precision, will accumulate to a tangible divergence in behaviour and ultimately a disconnect. When dealing with multiple architectures, operating systems and optimising compilers, tracking down all possible differences is a long and complex task."

And here I always assumed math was math. I guess it must be differences of precision and how random values are generated.

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